Benefits of Fasting for Your Health

Benefits of Fasting for Your Health

Fasting is usually done by Muslims in Ramadan, but you can still get health benefit of fasting by abstaining from food for period of time. Based on many studies, fasting can give you many benefits, both for your body and brain, if you do it right.

Here are benefits of fasting.

Help You Lose Weight

Fasting can help you lose weight because when you are fasting, you eat less meals which means less calories. If you are fasting to lose weight, just make sure you do not overcompensate by eating too much when you finally break your fast.

Aside from helping you to eat less, fasting also enhances hormone function that will help you to lose weight. Fasting can lower insulin level while increase growth hormone level and amounts of norepinephrine. All of these will increase the breakdown of body fat then help the fat being used as energy.

This is why fasting for short period will increase your metabolic rate.

Fasting Can Reduce the Risk of Type 2 Diabetes

Type 2 diabetes, which becomes more common nowadays, is caused by high blood sugar levels in the context of insulin resistance. So, if you want to lower the risk of getting type 2 diabetes, you need to reduce insulin resistance. And fasting can help you do just that.

Aside from that, fasting can also reduce the blood sugar level. Fasting can also protect kidney from damage, which is one of the complications that is caused by diabetes.

Fasting Can Make Your Heart Healthier

As of now, heart disease the biggest killer in the world. If you want to keep your heart healthy, you can try fasting. Fasting can improve various risk factors of heart disease such as blood pressure, blood sugar levels, total and LDL cholesterol, inflammatory markers and blood triglycerides.

Fasting Helps You Live Longer

This might seem hard to believe, but the less you eat, the longer you can live. Many studies show that people from certain cultures live longer because of their diets. When you grow older, your metabolism becomes slower. So the less you eat, the less burden your digestive system needs to take.

Fasting is Beneficial for Your Brain

Fasting is good for your body. So is it for your brain. Fasting can reduce oxidative stress and inflammation. Fasting can also reduce blood sugar level and insulin resistance. More importantly, fasting will increase Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF).

The function of BDNF is to activate brain stem cells so they can change into new neurons. BDNF also trigger various chemicals that will promote neural health. More importantly, BDNF can protect your brain cells from changes that are associated with Parkinson’s disease.

Fasting Makes Your Immune System Better

Fasting can reduce free radical damage and regulate inflammatory conditions which can improve the immune system. Fastin can even stave off cancer cell formation.

Fasting Helps You to Get Better Skin

When you are fasting, your body stops digesting, even if temporarily, so it can focus its regenerative energies on other systems. Even if you are merely fasting for one day, it can help your body to clean the toxins.

Since there are many health benefit of fasting you can get, you might want to try it out.